Mazes, Monsters, Charlatans, Satan and Suicide: A Short History of the Satanic Panic

One of my favorite pieces of Satanic Panic-era propaganda has to be Jack Chick’s “Dark Dungeons” religious tract. One of hundreds of such tracts created by evangelist Chick, “Dark Dungeons” is the story of two young women led astray by the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. One of them, Marcie, commits suicide after her thief character “Black Leaf” dies and the other, Debbie, is initiated into witchcraft after her cleric character Elfstar advances to eighth level. As the diabolical Dungeon Master “Ms. Frost” leads Debbie further from the loving arms of Jesus, her mysterious friend “Mike” pops up to tell her that she’s in grave danger. Following a visit to a mustachioed minister, Debbie repents and burns all of her D&D materials instead of saving them to sell on eBay in twenty years when she needs beer money.

Gamers, as well as most people with an ounce of sense, see “Dark Dungeons” for the hysterical kitsch it is, and rather than angering D&D players, it mostly amused them. I know my group loved it (“Where’s the real spells?” “No, Black Leaf!”) when we were kids. My parents didn’t buy into the Satan rumors that surrounded the game, or anything else I liked. Not all of my friends were so lucky: They had to hide fantasy novels, D&D manuals, heavy metal albums and other “Satanic” materials to keep them from being burned or thrown away by their parents. Others suffered in far worse ways: They were sent to camps for “troubled youth” or private Christian schools.

The disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III was one of the first sparks of the bonfire that would become the eighties Satanic Panic. Egbert was a highly intelligent but troubled young man who happened to play D&D in a group at Michigan State University. He disappeared one day in 1979, leading some people to believe that he had been driven insane by the fantasy game and wandered off into the steam tunnels underneath the campus to play it in “real life.”

Did you ever hear that story? You were supposed to, and soon you’ll know why. This is where reality and fantasy started to blur, but it did so for the public and media – not for Egbert and his friends. The Satanic Panic was about to begin, and by the time it was all over, innocent people would pay the price of religious zealotry with their professional careers, freedom, and in some cases, their lives.

Here’s the truth, but you weren’t supposed to know it: Egbert had indeed entered the steam tunnels, but with the purpose of committing suicide for reasons entirely unrelated to gaming. He had started college at 16 and had crumpled under the intense pressure of his new surroundings. The academic challenges and sense of social disconnect with his peers, drug and mental health problems, along with the fact that he was gay but closeted were far more likely reasons for him to attempt to take his life. After his unsuccessful attempt in the tunnels, Egbert had left town. His parents hired a private detective, William Dear, who eventually tracked Egbert down in Louisiana, where he had once again attempted to commit suicide. Egbert turned himself over to Dear, who in turn, surrendered Egbert to an uncle.

Dear, along with the Egbert family, wanted to keep Dallas’s drug problems and sexuality out of the news, but Dear recognized the high profile case as a fantastic opportunity for self-promotion. Never shy of an opportunity to talk to the press, Dear promoted his D&D theory, and the media ate it up. So did their audiences. The D&D theory became gospel and rapidly assumed a place in urban legend. Sadly, Egbert remained suicidal, and in 1980 he died as the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Among those following the Egbert case was romance novelist Rona Jaffe. Although she was not at all familiar with D&D, it didn’t stop her from writing Mazes & Monsters, a 1981 fictionalized account of the Egbert disappearance that took Dear’s D&D theory to heart. In Jaffe’s novel, character Robbie Wheeling was Egbert’s stand-in, but rather than committing suicide, he became psychotic and no longer able to distinguish between the game and reality. Meanwhile, uniformed parents, clergy, and law enforcement started have their own problems distinguishing between reality: It became “known” that Mazes & Monsters was “based on a true story”, and over time Robbie Wheeling and James Dallas Egbert’s stories became confused. A made-for-tv movie based on Jaffe’s novel was released in 1982, starring Tom Hanks as Robbie Wheeling. Undoubtedly, this contributed to the confusion, leading some to believe D&D didn’t just kill people; it drove them insane

Another tragic suicide occurred the same year that Mazes & Monsters came to television screens around the nation, and it would have an even greater impact on gamers than Egbert or Jaffe. Virginia teenager Irving Pulling was an avid D&D player, like many young people in 1982, and one day after a game at his high school he came home and shot himself in the chest. Unlike the Egberts, Irving’s mother, Patricia Pulling, really did blame his death on the game and claimed that he was the victim of a “curse.” The grieving mother filed an unlawful death suit against Irving’s high school principal and D&D publisher TSR. Both cases were dropped, but the tragic loss of her son inspired her to form an organization she called B.A.D.D.: “Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons.” (See their brochure here.)

Pulling remade herself as an expert on the occult and Satanism, and as the public face of B.A.D.D, set forth to warn the world about the dangers of the fantasy game. Pulling’s increasingly hysterical claims gained traction among conservative Christian groups, and soon the “occult expert” was making appearances on national media, including an episode on news digest program “60 Minutes” in which she confronted the game’s creator Gary Gygax. In 1984, she became the president of the National Coalition on TV Violence, but her crusade against D&D continued. Tellingly, around the same time, fellow NCATVer, psychiatrist Thomas Radecki, quoted a letter written by a character in Jaffe’s Mazes & Monsters as proof of the game’s ability to inspire suicides.

Possibly inspired by all of the attention Pulling was getting, William Dear took pen in hand and wrote his own book about the Egbert disappearance. The Dungeonmaster: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, was released in 1984. Dear’s account focused almost exclusively on the D&D angle. The timing was perfect: Pulling and her ilk had succeeded in terrifying some part of the public, and Dallas wasn’t around to tell the true story anymore. The book earned national attention, adding even more fuel to a fire that should have never been lit in the first place.

Also released in 1984 was Chick’s aforementioned religious tract “Dark Dungeons”, which as I mentioned saw brisk circulation among gamers and concerned clergy alike – although for entirely different reasons. Chick, a fundamentalist’s fundamentalist, saw the game as part of a worldwide conspiracy organized by Satan. To be fair, it wasn’t that hard for anything to get added to Chick’s Satanic conspiracy: Pretty much anything that wasn’t literally interpreted Biblical fundamentalism was up for grabs, and pretty much still is.

Chick took a lot of inspiration from other major players in the Satanic Panic, including John Todd, a former preacher turned occultist turned preacher again who was making the rounds with claims that he had been a Satanic High Priest and a member of the Illuminati before turning to Jesus. These, among a great many other claims, were revealed to have been lies. For the time being, Todd, who had been telling these stories since the seventies, was riding high.

Todd wasn’t the only seventies-era “former Satanic High Priest” to come out of the woodwork. Mike Warnke, an opportunistic would-be comedian turned “Christian Comic” had authored The Satan Seller in 1972, a book about his supposed experiences as a high-ranking Satanist in a secret organization. The book had been released to coincide with the early seventies rise of Christian fundamentalism, but with people like Pulling, Chick, Dear, and all the rest – plus the growing influence of the “moral majority” – the book gained a new life. Warnke started hawking his book again and doing interviews about his “experiences.” Like Todd, Warnke toured churches around the country, passing the bucket – yes, a bucket – for donations between corny jokes and hair-raising tall tales about human sacrifice. (I remember it well, because a Southern Baptist girl I was dating hoodwinked me into seeing Warnke’s traveling show.)

Satanism sold in the eighties, and terrified parents dealing with rebellious teenagers – especially Christian parents – practically ate out of the hands of people like Warnke and Pulling. As D&D lost its ability to scare and became more mainstream, heavy metal music became a more appealing target. In 1985, Tipper Gore and a group of similarly bored and easily frightened Washington wives formed the Parents Media Resource Center – the PMRC – and succeeded in organizing a series of hearings in which both heavy metal musicians and “experts” on Satanism and other salacious topics, testified for and against claims that music was driving children to suicide, Satan, drugs, or sex. The hearing resulted in the Recording Industry Association of America voluntarily adopting “Parental Advisory” stickers that warned parents about the “explicit content” to be found in the albums they were affixed to. For kids like me, they might as well have been seals of approval.

Another troublesome, related trend that had been brewing since the early eighties was the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” scare. What might have just been laughed off or ignored any other time seemed more credible to some, especially with people like Pulling and her ilk making the rounds to talk about the plague of Satanic crime sweeping the country and corrupting its youth.

Supposed victims became popular guests on talks shows, often claiming that they had recently recovered repressed memories of the incidents through psychotherapy. Books on Satanic Ritual Abuse and related topics sold well, even if they should have been shelved in the “fiction” sections of the bookstores at which they were sold. Psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient (and eventual wife after he left his first one) Michelle Smith co-wrote the lurid Michelle Remembers, a supposed account of Michelle’s childhood victimization and eventual escape from a “Satanic Church” that kept her in a cage, doused her in blood, summoned Satan in the flesh, and then reprogrammed her to only remember the events later. People ate it up. And when I say People, I mean the magazine – along with tons of other national media sources. Pazder became famous as the person who coined “Satanic Ritual Abuse” and started to offer his services as a speaker and consultant along with Mike Warnke and a few other imbeciles as part of the “Cult Crime Investigation Network.”

Another popular example of the genre is 1988’s Satan’s Underground: The Extraordinary Story of One Woman’s Escape. Underground‘s author, Lauren Stratford (a pseudonym) claimed to have been a “breeder” for Satanic groups, birthing babies to be sacrificed and eaten. Stratford wrote a couple of other books about her “experiences” and secured her own ticket on the Satanic Panic express.

Both Smith and Stratford appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show together, but strict control of internet content – along with Oprah’s mostly successful strategy of distancing herself from her sensationalistic past – has kept me from finding any scenes from that particular episode. I did, however, find Lauren Stratford on Geraldo. It’s a clip from his hour-long special on Satanism – a ratings blockbuster.

Terrified parents had started looking for signs of Satanic Ritual Abuse at day cares and other places where children were cared for. They saw what they wanted to see. Police investigators and social workers did, too. They asked leading questions of young children, who of course told the adults what they thought they wanted to hear. District attorneys, police and media saw these as career-making stories, and innocent people went to prison – in some cases for a decade or more. The McMartin Preschool Trial was the best-known of these travesties (Michelle Remembers author Lawrence Pazder served as a consultant on the case.) but there were others. Sadly, diverting focus to these cases probably enabled a good bit of real sexual abuse to slip out of public sight. Books like Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse by Doris Sanford and Graci Evans probably didn’t help, either.

Charlatans and con-men weren’t the only people who saw an opportunity in the Satanic Panic: Satanists did too. made the talk show round. All of the media attention raised their profiles, and frightened Christians were easy enough to play for profit. Show hosts, in turn, saw easy ratings.

Patricia Pulling wasn’t done yet, and upped the ante in 1989 with the release of The Devil’s Web: Who Is Stalking Your Children For Satan? The book was written as a guide for parents and law enforcement personnel investigating cases that might possibly involve the occult. The book listed dozens of dubious examples of what parents and police should look for if they think a young person is involved in the occult, from heavy metal albums to earrings and even the Necronomicon, which Pulling treated as a real book. I suspect that she must have seen the “Simon” Necronomicon paperback at her local Waldenbooks and not known anything about the book’s “history.” Regardless, if this “occult expert” knew little about the her supposed area of expertise, her readers knew even less. At least, most of them. Pulling, along with Warnke, Todd, Stratford and all the rest were about to come under fire.

As the eighties wound down and the nineties began, promulgators of the Satanic Panic became targets themselves. Artists and entertainers started to fight back, as did investigative reporters who took the time to investigate some of these supposed Satan chasers. So did some mainstream Christian groups. Game designer and author Michael A. Stackpole authored “The Pulling Report”, in which he methodically took apart many, if not all, of Pulling’s claims about gaming and Satanism. Cornerstone, a Christian Magazine, took a look at Lauren Stratford and discovered her real identity: Laurell Rose Wilson, a woman with a very long, documented history of tall tales and mental illness. The magazine then took aim at Mike Warnke, and found that he too was a fraud. They also reported on Warnke’s fellow traveler, John Todd, but no one had to take Todd down: Pleading guilty to rape and child molestation ended his career as a Satan-chaser. The truth of the Egbert disappearance eventually came to light. Sadly, reason didn’t return all at once. Some of the men and women wrongly convicted in the McMartin preschool trial lingered in prison for years after the initial hysteria had subsided.

It wasn’t just backlash that did the Satanic Panic profiteers did: Changes in youth culture also spelled their doom. Heavy metal and hard rock fell out of favor and was eclipsed by hip hop. D&D inspired video games, which in turn replaced tabletop role-playing in many circles. High profile scandals involving televangelists (many of whom had helped push the panic) eroded the trust that the public had in them. Criminals who tried to blame Satan for their offenses found that the tide had changed, and no one cared to listen anymore.

A few of the Satanic Panic’s players managed to reinvent themselves with varying degrees of success. Mike Warnke came clean about his Satan stories and started a new ministry. He runs it today. William Dear continues his work as a private investigator. He appeared on Fox’s Alien Autopsy TV special and has written several books claiming that O.J. Simpson is innocent of murder. Tipper Gore seems to have left her role as moral guardian behind her. Rona Jaffe continued to write popular fiction until she died from cancer in 2005. She never wrote about D&D again.

After serving time in prison for rape and child molestation, John Todd died of cancer in a state mental hospital. He probably would have found it hard to beg forgiveness and resume his ministry, even if he had remained a free man: Todd alienated many mainstream Christian groups by accusing them of being Illuminati fronts. Todd’s teachings still have a following in conspiracy circles and fundamentalist Christian religious sects. Patricia Pulling continued to run B.A.D.D. in well-deserved obscurity until her death from cancer in 1997. Laurell Rose Wilson changed her name once again to Laura Grabowski and started claiming that she was a survivor of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp and that she had been subjected to medical experiments by Joesph Mengele. Once again, she was exposed as a liar. She died in 2002 at the age of 60.

Some of the last victims of the Satanic Panic are starting to reclaim their lives. The final victims of the McMartin preschool trial are getting out of prison, and of course, The West Memphis Three (most people believe them to be victims of the Satanic Panic, but there are still some who think they are guilty of a horrific child killing that saw them convicted and sent to prison) have finally gained their freedom. Regardless, there are probably many others convicted of “occult” crimes they didn’t commit. (Not to say that there aren’t real occult crimes, mind you.)

So why did it all happen in the first place? Sociologists consider the Satanic Panic to be just one episode in a long line of “Moral Panics.” These episodes usually occur during times of societal insecurity, when threats are arising against the status quo. It’s a form of scapegoating – a way to find a target for all of that troublesome anxiety. People like Warnke, Pulling, and Gore are always around to fan the flames and grab a few bucks by directing the public toward a likely target (or targets) that benefit them individually or groups or interests that they represent. With the Cold War threatening to turn hot, increasing secularization, economic competition from Japan, and traditionally safe jobs like factory line work suddenly being shipped overseas or eliminated completely by automation, people were scared. A good old fashioned bogeyman was probably a welcome distraction.

This isn’t to say that the Satanic Panic is over, either. It has just gone underground: Alex Jones and others continue to espouse the belief that an underground organization of child-molesting Satanists run the world. Could we see a resurgence of the Satanic Panic? Probably not, but conditions are certainly right for another moral panic of some sort.

Yeah, I thought that you guys would find it amusing. (Who the hell wants to buy that???) Also, more importantly, I had to have a reasonable justification to use copyrighted content. In the context of a discussion using such things is normally allowed, but when I get into writing about things that could possibly piss off litigious, publicity-seeking kooks then I get extra cautious. Humor me.

BuzzCoastin

reminds me that I oughta read elaine pagles book on the origin of satan
a puerly western concoction

Matt Staggs

Are you sure about that being a Western concoction? I thought it had roots somewhere in the Middle East…. Of course, the Western world *did* take it and run with it, but that’s how myths go, right?

Edit: I added her book to my wishlist. Looks like a good one.

BuzzCoastin

the Satan character & his role
are purely western
the Lavant being the source of westetn religious culture
there are devils in Asia
but no one head devil like Satan
I can’t think of any other religions
outside of the west
that has a devil equal to the supreme being in power

Ted Heistman

what about Zoroastrianism? Or is that considered Western?

BuzzCoastin

it’s a matter of opinion
butt Lavant religions are part of the western tradition
Thus Spoke Zarathustra

even Hinduism has something of western tinges
but no supreme evil one
Shiva is kinda both
and therefore closer to Asian

Robert William Alexander Jr.

To The God of This World

Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce

And dost not know the Garment from the Man

Every Harlot was a Virgin once

Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan

Tho thou art Worshipd by the Names Divine

Of Jesus & Jehovah; thou art still

The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline

The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill–Blake

Matt Staggs

I’m a huge, huge fan of William Blake. There’s probably another Disinfo article in there all by itself.

Phoenix

It’s not at all that Hinduism is influenced by the West- the early polytheist and animist religions of the West and Vedic beliefs came from the proto-Indo-European roots of civilization that sprang up in Western Asia. Vedic religion (the “daeva-worshippers” of Zoroastrianism) split with the followers of Zarathustra, and itself influenced such disparate traditions as Germanic heathenism, the Roman and Greek pantheons, and ancient Egyptian beliefs. Not the other way around.

Oginikwe

One of my favorite stories (greatly shortened):
The missionaries showed up in Guatemala to preach to the Indians and the priests were explaining the devil to them:
“He lives where it hot, stifling hot, and it’s awful!”
A light went on over the Indians’ heads, “Hey! We know him! We like him! He makes our peppers grow!”
The priests were aghast, “No! No! he’s bad! You can’t like him–he’s bad!”
The Indians were resolute, “Nope. He’s a good guy, he makes our peppers grow, and we really like him.”

There you go: the impact of culture on mythology.

Oginikwe

Dionysus/Bacchus: god of wine, poetry, & song is thought to be
the beginnings of the Christian Satan which is what you would do if you were a member of that new Christian cult and trying to co-opt all things pagan way back when.

Lucifer/Satan was (Lucifer originally “the light bearer”: Satan comes from an Arabic word for “adversary” and wasn’t a personage but a role or function) originally a friend of sorts intended to test mankind’s goodness but later mythology turned him into a fallen angel who was envious of men and became their adversary. I think it’s a backwards way of glorifying ourselves via the great powers of our enemy.

You can get a Pagels 3-fer: “The Gnostic Gospels,” “Adam, Eve, and the Serpent,” and “The Origin of Satan” in one volume, ISBN 1-58288-179-0.

Matt Staggs

Thank you so much!!! I’ll got put it on my list now.

Oginikwe

Well, I have to tell you, the Gnostic Gospels are boring and redundant. I have that volume all by itself and unless I’m looking for something specific, I always fall asleep reading it. The others, though, are interesting and keep you awake. You may also like Riane Eisler’s “The Chalice & the Blade.” She has a lot to say about the sort-of-new research and the origins of Lilith and how/why she was replaced by Eve (which leads you to how/why Satan got to be a serpent).

http://www.aarondutil.com/ Aaron Dutil

I find it interesting that many of the “Satanic Panic” players died of cancer and fairly young…perhaps it was a spell and Satan won after all!

Shreck is creepy as fuck with his bitten off ear, at least he looks the part. He is apparently a practitioner of tantric Buddhism now. He seems to intimidate Charles Manson, when they appear together. His wife was a hottie when she was younger. weird vibe she has though.

I used to listen to Warneke on Christian radio in the early 90’s which is pretty funny! I was into it! I used to go to new age bookstores and evangelize.

Nikolas : I know that seems absurd to materialists unaware of the role unseen spiritual forces play in our lives. But experience has shown me that this is a very real phenomenon that should be taken seriously. Contrary to what one might imagine, I don’t think
this malevolent power has much to do with Manson himself. He’s only one of a long list of people fated to be involved in a case much bigger than him. One example of the malediction is the almost unbelievable series
of tragedies that have dogged Roman Polanski’s whole life. Then there’s Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. When he was drunk or stoned, which was most of the time, he told his friends about the true circumstance of the killings, dismissing the Helter Skelter legend as ”bullshit” and
suggesting that he bore some motivating responsibility for the crimes.
He kept threatening to write a book that would tell the true story. I believe his death by drowning was a result of the curse. Closer to home, one summer day in 1987, I was collecting the material for the first Manson File. I’d had trouble making a copy of the coroner’s drawing of Gary Hinman’s wounds, which clearly showed how his ear had been sliced by Manson’s sword a few hours before Hinman was killed by Bobby Beausoleil. The copy kept coming out wrong so that I had to look at this picture again and again. That night, I was attacked by unknown assailants who cut my right ear off. If that wasn’t magical warning enough, as soon as I got to the hospital, a social worker told me that I was eligible for financial compensation from a fund Doris Tate, Sharon Tate’s mother, had set up for victims of violent crime in Los Angeles. A magician ignores such obvious synchronicities at his peril. In the mid-90s several investigative journalists interviewed Zeena and me about what we’d discovered about the hidden facts of the murders. None of these sceptics believed Zeena when she warned them that this was a black hole one should only approach with spiritual precautions. When they researched
what we told them they were hit by instant bad luck, unexplained violence, mental and physical illness or financial catastrophe. Even while getting this new edition of The Manson File into print, a ridiculous number of obstacles delayed its completion. This happened so
often, every time my editor called to tell me the latest problem, he’d say, ”the Manson curse strikes again!” After a few decades of this kind of thing, you feel like you’re trying to open a locked door that some demon’s holding shut with all of its strength.

Ted Heistman

Well, he claims it was a random act of violence, but it was something pimps and drug dealers did in those days to send a message to certain people. Manson was known to have done it to people when he was a pimp.

Calypso_1

Actually he claims it was an occult synchronistic event related to his own workings.

Matt Staggs

There are some very unflattering stories about there regarding who did that and why. Unsubstantiated rumors, of course. The guy’s fascination with the SS always creeped me out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Werewolf. I’m not going to condemn him without actually speaking with him, but it doesn’t look good. To be fair, even if he was a bad guy then people can change, and who knows what kind of head space he’s in now?

http://www.pegritz.com Derek C. F. Pegritz

Radio Werewolf’s use of Nazi iconography was pure shock value, much like Marilyn Manson’s–though Herr Schreck was…maybe a little too into it anyway. Though I’ve never seen them live, I have most of their recordings, and the actual content isn’t particularly Nazi-friendly in anyway, even “Triumph of the Will,” which is more about a bad guy that “got away with it” then any glorification of the evil he did. When I was younger, I thought Radio Werewolf was trying to do the same thing Laibach does–appropriating totalitarian imagery in order to subvert it and repurpose it–but, no, they were just throwing out Nazi imagery to freak out the easily-offended PMRC types. Pretty juvenile stuff, actually–but their ambient album of “ritual music” is pretty damn good. That was one of the records that got me into stuff like Lustmord, Muslimgauze, White House, etc.

Frater Isla

I remember that mullet. Never got to hear him admit he was a liar, though. I’m rubbing this article in my mom’s face!

Matt Staggs

Yeah, I thought he was full of shit even then, and I was maybe 17.

Adam’s Shadow

“The hearing resulted in the Recording Industry Association of America
voluntarily adopting “Parental Advisory” stickers that warned parents
about the “explicit content” to be found in the albums they were affixed
to. For kids like me, they might as well have been seals of approval.”

Yes; this, exactly this.

Noah_Nine

ah… the satanic panic…. i remember it fondly…. the thing that folks always seem to lose sight of is that making something taboo often seems to create an interest in the very thing being denounced… that was certainly the case with D&D in southern Cali in Jr. High… role playing almst seem like it was a subversive act looking back on it…right up there with listening to hip-hop and not playing sports… these were ways for my young friends and i to avoid getting sucked up into the maelstrom of conformity that tore through our educational landscape… i almost have to thank the histrionic masses for adding gravity to a simple hobby and giving it an added flavor of rebelliousness… it taught me a fundamental lesson, that many times those who claim to know the most about something are the least informed… and also, that people controlled by fear will make snap judgments based on shoddy information as long as the info is presented as sound and factual… that’s heady stuff for a 14 year old…

http://www.pegritz.com Derek C. F. Pegritz

I just watched the Mike Warnke clip…and after the abjectly atrocious “comedy,” when good ol’ Super-Mullet Mike starts talking about a girl murdered in Louisiana, by a Satanic cult, who cut her “sexual organs” out with a knife, I immediately thought: that boy’s been to Carcosa. Plus…his hair’s kinda spaghetti-like, ain’t it? And I suppose in the right light his ears might look a little greenish–y’all see where this is going, right?

Matt Staggs

Nice reference!

http://www.pegritz.com Derek C. F. Pegritz

You know…the more I think about it, even the timing is right! Early-to-mid 1990s?! It’s uncanny. I wish I’d read this article before the series finale, ’cause I’d’ve told everybody that Warnke was The Yellow King.

Jonas Planck

Dammit, all these obscure Lovecraft references filtering into the mainstream… now I’m going to have to binge-watch this stupid TV show to find out what’s going on with all this. Three years ago, Facebook refused to indulge my insistence that I was an Inhabitant of Carcosa, and now It’ll probably let me… But I don’t know what that implies now that the reference has changed.

Matt Staggs

Mainstream? Hah. I’ve had a summer home in Carcosa for decades…

Jonas Planck

It’s broad definition of “mainstream”… these kids today haven’t even heard of the Canterbury Tales, much less the old pulp magazine WEIRD tales!

Jonas Planck

My favorite aspect of the satanic panic is the unspoken, unquestioned assumption that yes. it IS in fact possible, quite easy, even, to summon the actual devil himself, in person, in a basement or abandoned building using nothing but some silly incantations and the blood of a dognapped poodle… And logically, maladjusted teenagers do this all the time, imbuing themselves with vast occult powers and abilities which are cited as being so addicting that the “satanist” must keep performing these rituals to gain more and more powers. What these abilities and powers actually WERE is never explained, but rest assured they are very real, according to the ministers who had appointed themselves “experts” on the occult! We are left to assume that the reason no reports ever actually surfaced of horror-movie style revenge plots or high-profile crimes performed using these alleged supernatural abilities is that the maladjusted teenagers in question squandered their vast supernatural powers on beer, pot, and the sexual favors of teenage girls who had Kip Winger posters plastered all over their bedrooms. We are, of course, discouraged from extrapolating this premise… it leads to the suggestion that perhaps some of our CEOs and political figureheads are among the few who used these supernatural powers in the way they were intended…

Juan

Brilliant piece, Matt. Really took me back remembering all that stuff.
Moral panic for sure. Simply the Salem witch hunts in a more modern context.

beth

Johnny, Neil Brick believes himself to be a victim of Satanic Ritual Abuse and government mind control. He also believes himself to be a former assassin for the Illuminati, and according to him, he still has several “alter personalities”. Consider his own apparent delusions before taking his website as a factual, unbiased source.

Matt Staggs

Yeah, there’s only so much crazy I could fit in…

Hermes Trismegistus

But didn’t he prove that some of the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” was real? And that the conspiracy stretched into the CIA and FBI???

Matt Staggs

I think Infowars might be a good place to research that.

Hermes Trismegistus

lol common now… “conspiracy” carries such a stigma. I just figured you were familiar with Ted’s work on the subject. I’ve already done my research, I was just hoping for a second opinion.

Sane Spirit

Most excellent information, thank you

Kragnorak

IT’S MY FAULT BLACK LEAF DIED! I CAN’T FACE LIFE ALONE!!!

Phoenix

Trafficking? That’s a leap. If anything, it’s panic about gay marriage (bolstered by people’s inability to mind their own business), governmentally-sponsored fear regarding terror and the necessity for total surveillance at all times, and illegal immigration. I don’t think I’ve seen any evidence at all that human trafficking rings are fabrications- quite the opposite- and I certainly haven’t seen a single shred of evidence to indicate that the government is using trafficking as a scapegoat to increase “repression, etc” (see above).